History
Steel City Re’s parametric reputation insurances, ESG insurances, and risk management advisory services mitigate the hazards of ESG and Reputation risk.
We are the world’s only source of parametric ESG and reputation insurances. Our lead risk-bearer is Lloyd’s of London’s Tokio Marine Kiln, with line slip support from Miller Insurance. Our captive insurance solutions are explicitly welcomed in Bermuda, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Utah; and implicitly in Vermont and New York.
Our reputation risk management advisory services integrate principles of quality management and behavioral economics. We support these services with prioritization tools using quantitative loss models and internal prediction markets.
Our credibility is substantiated by the proprietary quantitative methodology underpinning our insurance and advisory services. With a data set comprising 7.8 million measures of reputational value, and augmented weekly with 8300 additional public company measures, our valuation technology has been authenticated over two decades through equity market strategies by various hedge funds and made transparent through the Reputation Variety Index (INDEXCME: REPUVAR). Our own S&P500 arbitrage index is outperforming the market as of Sept 1, 2022 by 407.23%.
Our authority as thought leaders is recognized in the legal,1,2,3,4 risk,5,6,7,8 finance,9,10,11,12 and governance13,14,15,16 literature including emerging governance standards of the American Law Institute.17 Our foundational publications include the books Mission:Intangible and Reputation Stock Price and You published in 2010 and 2012 respectively. 18,19
Where it all began…
Our roots trace back to several parallel explorations of intangible asset valuation, management, monetization, and risk transfer beginning in the late 1990’s. Some of these efforts were reflected in the activities of The Patent & License Exchange, an award-winning dotcom-era market for technology real options, aka patents, whose international expansion was memorialized in a Harvard Business School case study. Other efforts were reflected in the programs and publications of the Intangible Asset Finance Society.
Another thread traces back to exposures to intelligence operations during Nir Kossovsky’s tour of duty in the United States Navy Reserve and graduate of the Naval War College, and Peter Gerken’s tour of duty in the United States Army. Combining these intelligence operations experiences with our civilian work, we appreciated how the new corporate threats were enterprise-wide and were as likely to arise from internal matters as they were from changes in the social and cultural environment. The Economist recognized this as “reputation,” and crowned it the “risk of risks.” We formed Steel City Re to estimate the value of a firm’s reputation premium and mitigate the hazards that imperiled it.
We began by capturing data on a weekly basis on thousands of public companies, developing equity indexes based on companies’ reputational metrics, and offering this data to Wall Street via REPUSPX, while concurrently offering analytical and consulting services to the corporate market based on the same reputation value and risk ontology.
Further, we announced in March of 2021 that equity portfolios built algorithmically on 1,000 weeks of Reputational Value Metrics have– over 15 years– outperformed both the net asset value (NAV) of MSCI USA ESG Select ETF, one of the oldest ESG funds, and the price returns of Berkshire Hathaway, a firm chaired by reputation-savvy Warren Buffet. Our nearly 7 million Reputation Value Metrics—synthetic measures of reputation value gathered over 20 years—continue to empower third-party investment strategies and equity indices.
In 2012, we were approached by Tokio Marine Kiln, a Lloyd’s syndicate, which provided the initial risk-bearing capital that enabled Steel City Re to use those same reputation value metrics and analytic tools to underwrite and provide reputation insurance products to companies that met its objective mathematical criteria for superior reputation risk management.